Hellscape: The Tenth Hunger Games
by Sir Egg of Breakfast
Summary: In honour of the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games, the Capitol has prepared a very special celebration. A documentary honouring and chronicling the Tenth Hunger Games, featuring an interview with one of the oldest living victors, Hannel Gunnerson. When forced to confront the worst memories of his life, will Hannel crumble or be able to survive, one last time?
1. Dart

Hellscape: The Tenth Hunger Games

 _"Hello, hello, hello, helloooo ladies and gentlemen!" C_ _aesar Flickerman rolls the O between his pristine white teeth. Like a connoisseur with fine wine, he lets the vowel dwell on his tongue for just the appropriate length of time. His hair and make-up are a bone-white today. They give him the appearance of a grinning skill bouncing around on a spinal cord, like a child's rattle._

 _Hannel Gunnerson can't believe it. Sixty-five years, and the hosts have only got more annoying._

 _"We've got a very special show for you tonight. With the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games around the corner, we've been recapping our faaaavourite Hunger Games!" Caesar holds his arms out wide, his manic grin firmly in place. Hannel wonders if it is pinned in place. The audience cheer, baying for blood they have yet to grow tired of. "But we have a rather unusual one tonight." He pauses. The audience quieten and sober up._

 _"The Tenth Hunger Games are not talked about very much these days. In the excitement of Quarter Quells, we tend to overlook the few games which established and founded our noble Panem we know today. But no longer."_

 _"The Tenth Hunger Games have gone by many names- Hellscape, the Bloody Arena, that damned mess as our unlikely Victor Hannel Gunnerson so memorably dubbed it-" Hannel grimaces as the audience laughs their ugly chorus of birds laugh. They're playing him as the Grumpy Old Man for cheap laughs. He remembers the interview's sting, even after thirty years. When they were listing the names of dead children and laughing,_ laughing _of all things about it, how else was he supposed to respond? That was certainly the least colourful thing he called his own games._

 _"-with some scenes deemed so violent, they have only just been approved for showing, for the first time, in our twelve part documentary: Hellscape: The Tenth Hunger Games."_

 _Hannel feels his fingers itch for a cigarette. His doctors forbade him especially, and Hannel ignored them especially. But the Capitol took special notice in him this year. He's an old, old bastard but they can't let him die before they've dragged their painted monkey out for one final dance._

 _"And onto our next segment. Katniss and Peeta, the wedding of a century- what will they be wearing? Our two lovely presenters are on an mission to find out-"_

 _He switches the television off with a dismissive grunt, and flops back on his hotel bed in the Capitol._

 _All he wants to do is forge_ _t about the awful events of sixty-five years ago. But almost against his will, his eyes drift closed and memory claws its way through the unforgiving darkness-_

It's beautiful when it rains.

He's heard they loathe rain in other districts- take umbrellas out, put tarpin up and the like- and the Capitol is said to have its own dome up to keep the rain out, a paper-thin crust of diamond that lets every drop of rain slide right clean off it. Course that was what Billy Spencer told him in the factory yesterday, which wouldn't be such a doubtful thing if it weren't that Billy was also convinced the machine on floor 3E was haunted by the ghost of his dead cat. He lost an arm to the swishing silver teeth trying to give it a tummy rub a few months ago.

But it's beautiful to see even in a place like Factory 3-6-1. It turns to liquid silver down the open window-pane, where a few drops splash deliciously against his skin when he leans close to the lead-lined pane. The pounding of the rain is enough to drown out the endless machine thrumming that drills into his head and has crept into his dreams in a flurry of pounding needles and tangled threads. Sometimes it seems like he's only ever known peace in the rain.

He loves the _smell_ of the rain the most. When he's walking home after a twelve-hour factory shift, hands raw and red and back aching, there's nothing more he loves than smelling the rain. The copper-y tint that makes him think of grass he's only ever seen in pictures and when he turns his eyes right up to the sky, right up in that deep-grey dusk it makes him feel like he could be anywhere else in the Districts, makes him feel so free-

" _Gunnerson!"_

There the stab of pain in his back. Next thing he knows he's lying drooling on the floor, pain arching his body into strange shapes as a dark dullness spreads through where he's hit the unforgiving stone floor.

A pair of fine-sewed leather shoes (specifically made of the gold thread they sew in Factory 8-3-4 and the smooth light brown leather they make in Factory 5-5-5, as Hannel learnt in school, both of which are imported to Districts 5 to 9, materials reserved for people who are of a mediocre importance, notably respected most by themselves than anyone else) creep into view and none too gently kick his head upright to face the Inspector.

The Inspector is a clean-shaven man, with wild dark hair and blue eyes the colour of blueberry-dye. His uniform is pristine and probably made in another factory in District 8. He's a home grown man, mean and petty as they come in 8, and theres none he likes to have a go at more than Hannel. A taser swings from one hand, the air still smelling of sulphur slightly.

"Tell me, boy, do I pay you to stare out the window all day?"

"No, sir." Hannel forces the words out through the pain. He knows it will be worse if he does not reply. Fifteen or no, able-bodied or no, the Inspector will taser him to nothing on this concrete floor if he does not play the game. Hannel has seen it happen too many times.

The Inspector says nothing for a moment. Hannel, heart pounding in hope, begins to drag his weakened body upright. He is in severe pain, but he had been in pain before. He will be dead if he stays on the floor. The Inspector stops him half-climb, places his foot on Hannels chest, with Hannel awkwardly half-risen and unbalanced.

"Do you dislike working here, boy?"

"No, sir."

"I can assure you, there is a fine career as a beggar awaiting you if you do." The Inspector sneers down at him.

Shit. Hannel feels cold beads of sweat roll down his back. He needs this job. His mother can't work, and his father won't work, leaving him and his eight-year old sister to bring back the money.

For better or worse, he _needs_ this job.

"Do you dislike me, boy?"

"No, of course not, sir."

"Liar." Hannel doesn't deny it.

After what seems like a lifetime the foot is lifted. The Inspector allows Hannel to rise-

A sharp strike across the face. Hannel is stunned, he stumbles; but by some incredible feat remains standing. The Inspector looks disappointing. "Get back to work, then." He snaps, and walks off, his taser swinging at his side.

Hannel feels weak with relief, or possibly faint from pain. He can't make his scrambled mind up. Either way, he returns to work, his fingers nimbly working the barrels of fabric through the beast of a machine in front of him. None of the other boys on his floor looked up during this encounter. Hannel doesn't blame them; its something everyone learns quickly in the factory; least, all the smart ones do. Ignore what doesn't involve you, and run from what does involve you.

Always go unnoticed. That's how you survive.

He bites his tongue betwixt his teeth; and notes, with indescribable sadness, the rain has ceased to fall.


	2. Clipping

There's three things everybody who makes it past eight knows about Eight: don't be keen on the green (cos there's none of it), your only real perspective choices for a career are factory work, factory work or factory work (only don't expect to see any of what you make again). But most of all: _Don't talk about things before the Games_.

Especially not on Reaping Day.

So it seems like a cruel twist of fate to Hannel that his mother might just be the only person in Eight who's determined to break all of these rules at once. He thinks about it as he trudges home in the mud, the rain too long-fallen to leave any of its smell behind. His back and arms are aching and he wants nothing more to collapse, mud and all, but he can't stop. Needs to get home and make sure the family is in order (or something vaguely resembling it) before the Reaping tomorrow. He feels sick when he thinks about it. Not for himself or his sister (who, thank God, being eight is still under the age limit) but mostly for his mother.

He remembers what she was like last year- in near hysterics, convinced the Capitol would snatch her children away like they'd been doing to so many for the last decade. She'd screamed about it, told them they were bloody thieves and murderers, even go so far to say the Rebels should've won- something most people didn't even dare to _think_ , not if they wanted to keep their tongues in their mouths.

Hannel remembered stuffing a wad of fabric in her mouth, the cheap fabric rough and fraying against his fingers, claiming illness and hysteria; _anything_ to get her out of there. She'd never liked the Games but she'd been getting worse recently, he thought as his brow furrowed in worry. Everybody knew what happened when people started getting too mouthy about the games- a heart attack here, an accident there. And that was if you were lucky. Sometimes people just disappeared from the blue, buttons ripped from a jacket.

She cursed him, cursed the Capitol, cursed the grass-less ground, cursed Eight and God from the forbidden religion and cursed herself and her withered legs. And what difference did it make? This was the way things were. Hannel didn't like it- but so long as it didn't involve him, he could ignore it. He couldn't change it- but he could live alongside it at a push. Even though watching the games was mandatory, when you were watching it all on television it was easy to ignore, to pretend the kids dying were just actors.

It's only make-up, he'd told his terrified sister last year as they watched a thirteen year old boy be impaled by a towering sixteen year old.

Just actors, as two bloodied, beaten and fearful kids hacked each other to pieces with blunt swords. All they'd had in the area that year had been blunted, Hannel remembered with a shiver.

As fabricated as anything we make in Eight, he'd lied to his sister, as a girl was torn to pieces by swollen, hideously modified scorpions that could barely stand under the weight of their augmentations. It took forty-three minutes for her to die. Hannel counted every second on his fathers bronze pocket watch. _Tick. Tick. Tick_. Went the ebony hand around the cream face. _Drip. Drip. Drip_. Went the crimson stream that had once been a girl.

Only makeup. Only actors. Not real screams. Not real blood.

Not real death.

And the worst part, Hannel reflected as he turned the corner to their tightly-packed block of flats, was sometimes he actually believed it.


End file.
